The Labor frontbencher Tanya Plibersek has rubbishedLiberal party objections to quotas to boost female representationin frontline politics, while dismissing claims longstanding Labor rules subvert democracy.
As a series of reviews into the Coalition’s emphatic 3 May election loss get under way, the shadow defence minister,Angus Taylor, has opposed a push for changes to preselection rules to promote Liberal women into winnable seats.
Taylor, a leader in the conservative wing of the party’s New South Wales branch, said gender quotas “subvert democratic processes” and that mentoring, recruitment and support of women were better strategies to achieve increased female representation.
Plibersek told ABC TV the justification was wrong, noting Labor had passed gender parity using quotas, while the female MPs made up less than a third of Liberal parliamentary ranks.
“They’ve got a quota of National party MPs that have to be on the frontbench,” she said. “So they’re happy to have quotas for National party MPs. It’s just quotas for women that they’re not prepared to use.
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“Does Angus Taylor really want people to believe that the 28 most talented Liberals in the whole country are the people who’ve made it into the federal parliament?”
Plibersek noted that the Liberals had ignored a non-binding 50% target for female representation put in place after the 2022 election. Labor introduced binding gender quotas in 1994 and has used the intervening decades to toughen its rules.
The opposition leader, Sussan Ley, last week used a speech to the National Press Club to pledge to recruit more women to the Liberal party,saying she would be a “zealot” for that objective.
But Ley, the first woman to lead the Liberals, said she was personally agnostic about whether quotas were needed, insisting management of preselection processes was the responsibility of state divisions.
“Our party must preselect more women in winnable seats so that we see more Liberal women in federal parliament,” she said.
“Current approaches have clearly not worked, so I am open to any approach that will.”
On Sunday Taylor said he and Ley agreed theLiberal partyneeded more female MPs and female members.
“The key thing that we all absolutely agree on here is we have to mobilise a grassroots movement across our side of politics for the things we believe in,” he told Sky News.
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“That means having people who are representative of their communities, representative of the community here in Australia and we need to find every possible way to do that.”
Taylor called for a sensible debate about recruiting women to parliament and to the Liberal party’s membership more broadly.
“I’ve never been a believer in quotas to achieve that but its clear we have to take proactive action to achieve that.”
A formal review into the Coalition’s loss is being led by the Howard government minister Nick Minchin and the former NSW state minister Pru Goward. The Queensland Liberal National party senator James McGrath is expected to run a separate review into the party’s structure.
The opposition frontbencher Julian Leeser has called for consideration of preselection primary contests instead of quotas, while high-profile Liberals including the former minister Simon Birmingham and the NSW senator Maria Kovacic have called for mandated quota systems to prevent another drubbing by Labor.
The NSW Liberal Women’s Council will debate gender quotas at a meeting in Sydney this week.
The party has designated places in its federal council for the chair of the federal women’s council, as well as other groups including the Young Liberals.